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10 Dec 2016 12:46:54am

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"Why should any religious belief - christian or islam -be tolerated in this scientific secular age?"

Your post could be entitled "The day the enlightenment went out".

"Everyone is free to believe whatever they want (as long as they agree with me)", you imply.

Instead, scientific laws are predicated upon religious belief, for the following reason.

If you believe that reason is just a process that happens in your head, then scientific laws (which are a feature of reason) just happen in your head.

The fact that science and technology moves stuff around is just one heckuva bonus, on that view.

But that doesn't explain how a scientific law such as the law of gravity describes and predicts the operation of the force of gravity both billions of years before humans arrived to write down the law of gravity, or billions of light-years away where humans and their laws have no effect whatsoever.

Instead, the fact that the force of gravity acted according to the law of gravity even before humans arrived and wrote down the law of gravity, indicates that the law of gravity is not just a human construct.

The process of reasoning that happens in your head is to be posited as deriving its accuracy from a form of Reason that originates independently of us and yet is accessible to us.

Or can this pre-existing, independent, transcendent Reason be reduced to materialistic philosophy?